congratulations on new book africatown america s last slave ship and the community. it created. i was very intrigued when. i read it personally. i was intrigued by why you were inspired to write this book. and i guess, you know, that s a good place to start. why were you inspired? write this book. i think it is a good place to start. began in 2018 when zora neale hurston book american was being published. you know, it had been on the shelf for 90 years after she wrote it. it s her. it consists her interviews with cudjoe lewis, who one of the last living survivors of the clotilda voyage, the voyage of the last slave ship brought to the us and we were publishing an excerpt of the book in new york magazine. and my editor, murray abraham me in and said, hey, it would be really nice if we could have another to run alongside this one about what became of the descendants kojo so see if you can track them down and and she said maybe we ll send you a mobile and it turned out to be easier said than done to find them had the family had intentionally a low profile. but when i first got a member of that family on the phone gary lumbers who was living near philadelphia. remember i was in this hotel room in west texas working on another story. and said to me pretty forcefully, you don t need to be writing about the descendants. you should be writing about is the neighborhood. he said. when the neighborhood established by the people who had survived the slave and because still intact, it s this amazing historical treasure but gary said it it looks like a war zone now he said, when i was a kid, it was this beautiful, thriving. and now they ve built a highway through the center of the neighborhood. it s surrounded by factory use. there s all this pollution. a lot of the houses abandoned. what happened to it. he felt like it had been. this wasn t just a natural process of decay, but it was it was like a hostile takeover. and so i said, well, that s i would like write about that. that s it. that s a good that it s a good idea. but first, i do need to write this piece about the descendants so but i wrote about both for the magazine i managed to visit and i met all these i happened to be there on a day when a law firm was interviewing people at one of the churches in preparation for a lawsuit were filing against a factory that had polluted the neighborhood, suing them on the basis that had caused cancer for hundreds, thousands of people. and so i spoke to quite a few residents who rattled off a list of all the people in their families who had who had died from cancer often at young ages and who had survived cancer themselves. these stories were harrowing. and so i went back to new york and for a year or so in the back of head, i kept thinking, i wish that i could just move down there and piece the whole history of this community from 1860 to now and figure out the connection between the slave ship and the pollution like why did this neighborhood of all possible places in southern alabama sort of get designated to be the dumping ground for all these for all this heavy industry? and then it occurred to me one day when was walking from my office to the subway that i probably could do that. and, you know, a publisher would would would give me a contract it so i started tapping out a chapter outline on my phone that night and or excuse me the subway ride and i emailed my my agent when i got home and and she know along email describing what i wanted to and she she called me in the morning and said, this is a great idea. you should pursue it. well that s awesome. so, you know, i read the book i saw the book is just as much a historical narrative, you know, as anything and i, i guess for me, i was drawn into it because some of my history is wrapped there too. but i like for you to talk a little bit about how you did the research on, you know, the of africa where people were brought on or enslaved were brought from there could you in describing talk a little bit about what was it like at that particular time because the united states ended the importation of slaves but the mayors and in the end the two gentlemen that did this they went there and brought people back. how were they able to do that? and then what were the consequences, if any, that they suffered in doing it? yeah, happy to speak all of that. my my initial instinct is that it was that i was going to need to go to west africa to research this. but the covid took hold, not long after i started the book in earnest. and so i thought, well, me, let me figure out what i can do without going there. and i realized pretty quickly that that i didn t need to go because what i wanted to do was, describe what what these. countries and what these cities, west africa, looked like in the 1850s and 1860s. and so the best sources, the best resources for that were like travelogs travelogs and academic history. so i did it all from from reading. so we have quite a few. these are oral cultures in west africa that at the time were not recording their history in books. so so unfortunately the best sources we have and what things looked like in the 1850s are travelogs written by white men. you know, usually european men who would travel around the african continent and and just keep sort of a day by day account of what they saw. and, you know, of we have to take everything they say with a grain of salt. there s like a pretty clear colonial at work in these books. but at the same time, i think that, you know, when they re saying, like, i went to the market and, you know, they were selling x, y and z, you can sort of believe that that s you know, that is what the market looked like. and that what they were selling. fortunately, there is quite a vast body of scholarship from the last 50 years of that has built on and the work of these these, you know, 19th century europeans. but put it in context. you know, these historians have read it critically and so and have and have also work on the ground in west africa to help sort of put these these books in context. so i relied i took a lot of cues from from from scholars of africa. and i also had a couple of them, different chapters. so the situation was that this this country, the kingdom of dahomey, had for a long time depended on the slave trade for as the basis of its economy. in the 1850s, most western countries had stopped or had stopped trafficking in slaves. england in particular was was cracking down on the royal navy, policed the atlantic ocean pretty heavily heavily. but dahomey was, you know, reluctant to sort of go along with the europeans for a transition to a an economy based on palm oil exports. so. so it was a it was a kingdom in crisis. and that was context for this this last slave voyage in the alabama. there was this also sort of an economy in crisis that the cotton trade was booming. but there was this huge demand for enslaved workers. but it had been illegal 50 years to bring slaves over from west africa. so so as is really, i think, an act of political protest by this man in mobile, this business magnate named timothy mayer told some associates, i m going to bring over a ship of people and i m going to get away with it. like he said, you know, the federal government is saying they re going to crack down on these things, but i don t believe them. and i said, i m going to prove that you can do it consequence and and i think that he intended for this to be sort of a folly, you know, shot from from the side of these all of these southern businessmen who were actively to to reopen slave trade. so he arranged to have it done that the captain who he hired was a man named bill foster, who was a ship carpenter grew up in nova scotia and in the spring of 1868, foster went to the port of whydah in the gulf of guinea and brought back a ship with 110 men, women and children and sneaked it through mobile, unloaded the captives on another ship, and then burned his ship down to the waterline, destroy the evidence. there s very clear paper showing that federal officials knew all about this voyage, had a chance to had had a chance to rescue these captives. the federal marshal, the us marshal found, them sort being hidden on a plantation but he he couldn t get a warrant in order to make arrests quickly enough. the judge who was with timothy maier dragged his feet and there were no for any of the criminals involved. well so did all of the and i understand there were 101 people, enslaved people that were part of that voyage, where all of them did all of them settle in the town? it was 110. in fact, the majority did not. quite a few of them were sold to businessmen, to owners outside the city mobile. in a lot of cases, we don t know exactly they ended up but we know that some of them ended up in northern parts of alabama. the kept quite a few themselves. and there it was, a few dozen, 30, 35 who who started this community that, you know, that became as africatown after the civil war. let s talk about africatown. i mean, i ve always been fascinated with joe louis and his story because. i ve heard it myself for for quite a long time before it became. you know, part of what we were discussing now and just what new things you learned about him. i know there s there s a lot of folklore in it that i ve heard through the years and and then in reading your book, i saw that you do you do have that really deep and talked to a lot of people about africatown about who joe lewis and his influence as well looking at the history of sources. so what did you know after doing your research. do can you reveal something new about him that this book something new about him that we don t already know you know i found scraps of like news coverage from say the turn of the 20th century that i hadn t mentioned in any other books. one interview, for instance where where he the other shipmates said that they actually saved enough money after right. the civil war to go back to bill foster ship captain and ask to to to sail them back to west africa. and he said that s that s not nearly enough money. you know, this was a business proposition is a business venture. and and i m not going to do this as charity. and i m sorry, but there s just no way that you re ever going to be able to to make enough money to pay me to do that. so so i found details like that that that had not been reported before, but would say that to me one of the more memorable and, sort of startling discoveries about his life was that it s that s it s a little bit more contextual. he describes in the late chapters of baraka. and this sequence, where everyone in his family dies in pretty rapid succession. and he had six children and and a wife who all died in the space of between 15 and 20 years and in cases the most that the circumstances seem a bit mysterious, he ll say in baku something like and then son who was perfectly healthy in his thirties, just fell ill, went to bed and then was sick for two or three days. and then he passed and and we we don t really know what happened. and there s, there s no diagnosis. and so reading these these like health inspector reports from from mobile, from the turn of the 20th century, i realized what was going on there the city was was establishing plumbing, sewers, paving roads. but it was only doing these within the white neighborhoods. all of these improvements tended to stop at the color line and and the city also decided not to annex these black neighborhoods that were outside of the city limits. this is a period when nobody was trying to expand its population, but it was reluctant to bring more african-americans into the city. so. so these black neighborhoods like africatown effectively left in the 19th century. and these diseases were able to continue festering in neighborhoods like joe s. and i realize that s that s what he s talking in. and he probably didn t have access to information about about or perhaps he did. but but he doesn t describe in brooklyn in terms of of these political developments, in terms in terms of the jim crow laws and mores that were governing the development of this of the city in the county. but i think that we to take them together. what he s talking about really is i think you could say the first instantiation of environmental racism. it s it s not pollution. it s it but it s underdevelopment. and it if actively it s the same thing. it it was a it was a product of the jim crow mores and that that s very significant because what you re i think what the book does is kind of lay out a scenario for how we get from there and the connection between enslavement of people and used in slave to where we are now to to have these communities surrounded by all of this pollution and how we get there. and so as we go back to looking at the book. i one of the things i notice was the relationship timothy mair s family and the of these polluting plants in the town. could you talk a little bit about that, about the connection between about their connection to this came to be and how this community became victims of environmental racism? i would be happy to. yeah i have to say that when i started. this your book catherine had not yet come out and i felt. there was a real dearth of of literature on environmental racism and i felt like what your colleague bryan stevenson had done and michelle alexander had done with with the legal system and what what others had done with things like housing, discrimination, redlining. we didn t really have books that did that for environmental racism. and i think both of us are trying remedy that. so i would say that i always think about the reconstruction era where where one of my favorite americans, stevens he was one of the one of the the radical republican legislators gave this speech in pennsylvania, where he said, if we re really serious about about changing things, what we need to do is seize the plantations of these these southern aristocrats, break them up and give us the land to the black people. and he said, actually, a few things will will give the black people means to be independent and meaningfully free. it will break up the power of the southern planter class. and timothy maier would have been would been exactly the target for that kind of a policy. it would it would have changed everything. it s easy to imagine in a scenario like that, a lot of his land would have gone to these shipmates or it could could have it did that did not happen. obviously. instead, their their land and their wealth continued to be passed down from generation to generation in the 1920s, the northern paper industry was making incursions into the south and this enormous paper conglomerate, international paper, approached the chamber of commerce, and said, we d like to build a plant in mobile. can you hook us up with a property and? the chamber of commerce said, sure, how about this? this land that belongs to the mayor, augustine mayor, the son, timothy. timothy was the slaver and so, of course, the people in africatown had means of resisting they they d been they had no they had no they had no political power. they d been stripped of their voting rights. so so the paper company made a deal with with the mayor family. i think everybody knew that this factory was going to be smelly and it was going to emit a huge amount of pollution and they didn t want it downtown. so it made sense to put it in this black neighborhood and so that the mayor family ended up leasing selling land to two paper factories and over time it it we used and sold the land two more factories besides different different kinds of industries. so now. 160 years after the slave voyage, family still owns a massive amount of property. southern alabama and and and that includes a lot of the land surrounding africatown that these factories are sited on and they made immense of money from from leasing these factories that have polluted the neighborhood the family has avoided public attention for the most part. since the 1970s. but there are some signs that that they might be that they might be opening up. but that s good to hear. but i want to go back to a point that we raised earlier when we talked about oral history, how much did oral history play? because i saw a lot of the interviews you did. and so interesting for me to look at this and read it because a lot of those people know they ve been around and been fighting and for a very long for not just environmental justice, but for civil rights. so much. did oral history play in your research and in crafting this story, it played a significant role. i, i did tend to rely on documentary resources as much as i could. and i have to say that i found that many of the descendants of the shipmates are hungry to know what we have documented evidence for they have the descendants pore over the books that have been written about the neighborhood and they and they like to collect things. marriage certificates and deeds and old newspaper clips. but but they do have stories that they ve that they ve passed on along among their families that i also tried integrate in in the book. and in sometimes the lines sort of blurs because i was able to find interviews that were done in, say, the 1970s or eighties with or what your generations of descendants where they told that they knew from their parents that stories that i never heard from from people who are in the community now or who are descendants now. so it was always a back and forth between documented documentary sources and oral history. well, one of the things that struck me was was reading about the role of carter g. woodson in his role in the story. could you elaborate on that a little bit? yeah, this gets into into zora neale territory, which is a place where i m happy to be. i love i love carter g. woodson that as call him the father of african-american history. he was the editor in the 1920s of the journal of history. and zora neale hurston was an undergrad at barnard college here in new york. and her mentor was was franz boas a towering in american anthropology as she was getting ready to graduate, he boas said, i m going to try to find you a fellowship. so you go do some field research and he was able to come up with some money from columbia. and then carter g. woodson s organization, too, was able to come up with some money to to fund her trip. so she bought a car and drove around the gulf coast, her hometown in florida, which is eatonville over to alabama she interviewed joe wilson in 1927 and she wrote an article him that was published in carter g. woodson s journal later that year. unfortunately we found out decades later that that interview was largely plagiarized she she drew pretty heavily on that and another book that had come out about. 12 or 15 years earlier. it wasn t the plagiarism discovered in her lifetime, but but she went back, did more original research for the book that became american american. so with me, it s when i looked at the book, said she wrote the book in four parts. why four parts? i saw, you know, looking at it as a former history teacher like you divided it up so that people could get the relationship to the time. so could you talk a little about those four parts and why you chose to do it that way? certainly, the the divisions just seem natural. i, i have to say that they came in sort of late. i proposed to my editor when we were we had pretty much finished the text. we had done most of the copy editing. i said, you know, i really think there should be besides a chapter breaks, there should be bigger section breaks here. i had five chapters that cover the situation in west the clotilda voyage everything up to the civil war so that that pretty clearly like a like distinct section a second section covered reconnoiter action through through the 1930s through the end of kargil with us his wife because cudjoe was the last one the last in mobile to pass away then there s a leap 15 years forward 50 and 20 years forward in the 1950s when one of my principal characters and a good friend and and and somebody i admire joe womack was up in the community that he was born in. he was born just 15 years after country. lewis died. so so joe became my main vehicle for if we re talking about the modern history of africatown and so there are a few chapters that the community he was young and then go through the nineties and then there s a fourth section that covers developments from basically the past decade when, when joe has become this sort of a warrior for environmental justice. and you also talk about the environmental organization that is there in ramsey as you know, i know him know his work. and i just thought it was so significant that he also factors in to the modern day history the town. could you elaborate a little bit on what his organization, what ramsey is doing in there? of course, yeah. i, i admire ramsey so much. he he first comes up in the book in 2013. he was there at this meeting where there was a plan to to build a another tank farm, a whole bunch of petroleum near africatown. these tanks are enormous there. each one is like as big as a house. it s to to build these near africatown at the same time to build an oil pipeline that was going to go through the primary source of drinking water for most southern alabama and ramsey had been fighting the keystone xl pipeline. he had a background in in direct action and. so he came he came to these mobile aliens on what they could do. and i find it pretty stirring when he enters the picture there are a lot of people talking about there are a lot of white people talking about about their drinking water and, you know, understandable. they don t want they want, in my mind, going through their their water supply. but but ramsey steps up and says, don t, don t forget about these communities like africatown and prichard. these communities that are these communities of color that have been dealing with pollution forever. it was the last they ve been around. and he and he said, this is environmental racism. we need to recognize it that way. and it was a vocabulary that that even joe womack didn t have at the time joe womack, who grew up in africatown. he told me that that later on he once he started engaging in these protests, he kept hearing the term environmental and he had just gotten a computer and he went on the internet and he was thinking, what the hell was, environmental justice. and he he punched it into and he found this epa that explained environmental justice and environmental racism. and he said, oh, my god. like they wrote this for us, but but ramsey helped helped. he helped the people wanted to do something. he helped them sort of coalesce their efforts in and into a targeted program. and they started an organization called meet me jack mobile, environmental justice action coalition. and ramsey has been been a leader in that organization from the beginning. he ended up moving mobile from texas and he s dedicated the last ten years or so of his life to this project full time. ramsey, i should mention, is his american. he comes from a from a tribe that has roots on the gulf coast and i he s he s extremely savvy. he he interfaces a lot with with the federal government. i know he s got the ear of. the the regional director of epa and so i admire him for his his moral devotion and for his his as an as an activist. he knows how to get things done. he is i just thought is so interesting when i was reading this there are so many intersection and so many things that were very similar to what i was going through at the time when i saw that francis had been involved with fighting the dakota access at sea world, he and i could have both in it been there at the same time when we went to the fight pipeline and i just so also moved by the fact that a lot of what you write about is is true of a lot environmental justice areas. the difference at least the areas that are dealing with environmental especially if you look throughout the gulf coast and look at alley a lot of what you describe i ve heard in other places but, what s significant about this book is that the people that are impacted can actually trace their history back to africa at a certain time and they can there s connection between when they were brought from africa as enslaved people and the end of slavery and the events state and then that line that drawn from there to present day, which is different than what we would find any other area of the of a u.s. so how do you think what do you think the solutions are? how do how do we get to justice in communities like africa town and what you ve seen there, what do you think look like for the descendants yeah this is something i ve thought about a lot. i think we ve all everybody who has a stake in this story has thought about a lot. i would say that mobile is, as i say, and in my second to last chapter struggles with this question of whether it wants to be more like charleston charleston, beautiful waterfront city that that bases its economy on tourism and markets. it s it s excellent seafood or if it wants be more like houston and steak everything and the petrochemical industry and i have to give ramsey credit for that he s the one who pointed out this distinction to me. and the current leadership, the city just just refuses to. treat that as a serious question and insists that they can have it both ways. and the current mayor s slogan is that he wants mobile be the most business and family friendly in mobile excuse me, in america, as if there were no tension between those those goals. but in mobile s case, there clearly are. i mean, there s almost no access to the waterfront for for people who live in mobile because because it s all occupied by heavy industry. and in plays into the africatown question because i think mobile phones been a little bit reluctant to accept this, but the truth is that this is a city that s very proud of of aspects of its history, its maritime history, its time under french and spanish, understandably but its proud of its mardi gras traditions. but the truth is that there s nothing else in mobile history that that compares in terms of national and international significance to the story of africatown, the creation of this this neighborhood by west africans who would personally survive the middle passage. and so if they were going to base their economy more on tourism would make sense for for africatown to be sort the centerpiece and the local government does make some of support but but there s a lot of skepticism in the neighborhood about whether they re really serious. i think that if you were serious what you would do is is start to rid of the factories surrounding neighborhood you would rezone property so that so the factories there now the tank farms they re we re not in compliance. and what that would mean was that when their say when their tanks aged out and new ones to be built that the policies would say sorry you can t you build a new tank farm here. you can t you install new tanks here like that s you re done and that the local authorities like to say that this is not constitutional. it s not just simply be done legally. and that s not that that attorney who knows more about zoning than anybody else in southern alabama, wanda cochran. walked me through this and explain to me how it could be done. and the truth is that it can. of course, the city s economy is based, so it s, so dependent on the industry that s already there. it it would be really hard for them to do this. i think this speaks to why environmental racism is so to uproot. but that s i think that s what justice. looks like it like getting rid of the factories and and and and making it possible for this place really thrive again as a residential area would mean building more housing it would mean it would mean encouraging growth of black of of independent businesses used to be many black owned businesses that were wiped out by by construction and and it would mean it mean more investment in the neighborhood. i think that s true for similar neighborhoods apart from africatown too. it s certainly true for cancer alley, louisiana and explain both. you know, i ve actually spent some with some of the senators recently and i saw in your book you talked about with the highway and it could you kind of explain how it how the the highway system factors into the story of africatown because i know just from my own life experiences how these highways have been built and disrupted black communities. how did highways factor into the building of highways packed into system and where to africatown to the yeah it s it s a prevalent phenomenon as we both know in africatown case after these factories to be built it more and more of them accrued around the neighborhood. and there was a bridge across across the river close to the neighborhood that they use to transport materials for the industries in and out, you know, paper, use them to to bring logs back and forth and that sort of thing. so it was a but there were huge traffic delays. it was becoming unworkable for companies. so they wanted a new bigger tower, a bridge built in order facilitate this the state highway department had to build bigger highway leading up to it and it ended up wiping. africatown whole business corridor people. describe how the neighborhood used to have grocery stores movie, theaters, hotels it it had you know bars, nightclubs it had everything that that that you would need you know, you could buy you entertainment and it had had the necessities and as i say, most of these shops were owned by by local entrepreneurs, by black businessmen and women. of course, the community protested hard when when the state wanted to build this highway through that that corridor, there was a there was also a viable that would have required the factories to give up some of their land. there was a time when the state actually favored that idea and was moving in direction. but the companies hired the former i it was the speaker of the alabama house who is now working in private practice as an attorney to lobby against it and have the factory go through africatown instead. and that campaign was so in the 1980s, they they were moving forward with this plan at the same, there was an effort to get in africatown in the national historical program, or at least the national register of historic places and had it become a landmark, it would have there would have been protections against against these disruptive construction projects. you know, the law would have said, you can t destroy any more of this neighborhood. the reagan administration said, well, don t really think there s anything left there. it s all just now that was not in fact, there were about a dozen houses that had actually been built by the shipmates themselves, houses built by the people who survived the last slave voyage to the us if that doesn t qualify you for landmark status, then i can t imagine what would. but they never sent a team down to do a survey and so up to the last minute before the construction began descendants were pleading with the state highway department not to destroy these houses. and i found these letters where that that where an engineer the state said work if you want to pay relocate the houses, that s fine. but we re not waiting. we have we have a deadline to start the construction you know, every day that we delay cost more taxpayer money so, you know, either move them or or just get out of the way and us bulldoze them and ultimately most of the homes were not relocated and were destroyed along with the along with the business corridor. and instead of instead of a instead of a like a walkable, pedestrian, friendly area where you could go get your hair done, could go see a movie, you could go buy your groceries they built this five lane highway trucks passing through 65 miles an hour, broke the back of the neighborhood and the trucks are carrying hazardous cargo. so again, this happened in many but i think it s hard to find an example that s more egregious than the one that happened in africatown. so when you book basically what you describe is the fair you reconstruction the policies of the jim crow era you talk about how voting rights were taken away from people of color. the under-development that that in mobile around black communities where city services including plumbing sewer which i know so much about stop at the edges of the white communities and then in the seventies epa was and the dixiecrats started talking states rights. you know that. yeah. as you said in your book that that s the same rhetoric that was used to describe slavery but now you know we ve look at all of this and the continued in there of all of these things that have happening. i mean, i want to ask else, too, that, you know, same type of rhetoric that is being used now. the stereotype to even prevent us from talking about this history, even prevent maybe in the future a book about another book about the town or your book, even a part of this narrative that we need to discuss so we can get to where we need to. how do you feel about that? and it s current time. if you look at all of this and look at it seems like we ve come full circle to go back to where we started. yeah thinking about things like like these policies in florida banning this kind of history from from school curricula. i mean what, do you say about it it s it s it s really. i you you know, i recently wrote a piece for the washington post about this group, the afro-american bicentennial, that that was responsible for getting getting dozens of black history sites added to the landmarks program in the seventies and this was leading up to the bicentennial celebration in in 76. and they people knew that if they didn t if didn t get involved, the the celebrations were going to be totally eurocentric. it was just going to on white people s history. and and when i spoke with one of the people who spearheaded this event, forest, he he s he s in his eighties now when he said it s so disheartening to see these arguments critical race theory and these policies like the one in florida. it s like he said i feel like exactly same way i felt in 1970. we re like we re sometimes it feels as if we haven t made any progress in some ways we have. but he said it s clear that we re still fighting the same battles. i think he s right. it and i just want to you to also make sure we talk about the quality of and its significance here because i think it was during the time you doing your research that they actually found the children and why that is so significant significant. yeah it was i was in the early stages of working on a book proposal when i on the phone with joe womack and he said, did you hear the news and i didn t know what he was talking about. and he said they they found the ship in, the mobile delta. the wreckage is still still mostly intact. so a lot of people, both in africatown, surrounding africatown and at the senate say is that they re less concerned about the ship itself. they re what they care about is the people, whether that means for them, the people who in africatown now or the story of their ancestors. but they see the of this wreckage of the ship as a means to an end of of both telling the story and of restoring the community it s hard to imagine a better i guess a better asset building. this is a heritage. industry than than having the remains of the last the last slave ship still unclear whether it s going to be dredged, as i understand, scientists are currently assessing that would even be a possibility. we know that if it were, it would be incredibly expensive. as jim delgado, the chief archeologist, always says, where could that money be better? you know, maybe it could be better spent in africatown. but to their credit that the archeologists and other officials in charge of this have always said we re not going to make this decision ourselves, want this decision to be to be made by by the community descendants and the people in the neighborhood. so we ll see what comes of that. well, that s great. know that in my conversations them oftentimes when people talk about economic development in the town i saw that you talked about this in the book as. well they make reference to the the national example, the piece of injustice in montgomery and how this could that can be a model for africatown in terms of history and being able to to bring the type of economic development, the area that it doesn t currently have. do you see a relationship there now that you ve written the book between between what is happening in montgomery around this history and what could potentially happen in africatown? i do believe within a year of its opening, the the museum and memorial, montgomery had brought something like billion dollars in economic activity to the city and in a way, it does feel crass. talk about it in terms of dollars and cents, because obviously that project not it s not primarily a moneymaking venture. it s it feels like a sacred experience to go through it at the same time, you know our friends in africatown are very savvy. i said, and they know that that they have to appeal to more than people s moral sensibilities. they also have have a plan for how this could actually work. and they they, you know, they they they re sort of saying, look, there s another way. if you got rid of the factories, it s not it s not as if you would lose all that money. if there s there s an alternative there s another way of bringing tax revenue and spurring economic. i think they also take inspiration from the museum memorial in montgomery and the level of the kind of experience that it that it provides to people who visit which as i said, is a very stirring experience and it s encouraging to see that they re such a big audience for this this sort of thing. you know, i at the the smithsonian african-american museum pretty recently just just a few weeks ago on a saturday and i had to reserve my ticket weeks in advance. then when i got there, i had to you know, even having a ticket i had to wait for 20 minutes or something just to see the in a long line, just to see that, the first the first exhibit in the museum. and i mean, i was encouraged to see that. i was happy to be waiting. i was happy to see that there were so many people there because it reminded me and black and white, this crowd seemed pretty evenly mixed and it reminded me that i think that if they build something like in africatown, people will come and. the experience in montgomery really shows us that, well, this is my final question and this is one that i thought about asking earlier, but i think this is a great time to ask you and i like to know, how do you feel? tell me, how you feel as a white journalist, you know, having to navigate these complications to be able to bring of this out in the open? yeah, that s that s something i ve thought about from the very moment that i conceived the idea for the book, it s something i still think about lot. you know it s not as if there were journalists color queuing up to do this. it s not as if i was pushing anybody aside and i would not would not have done that. but i felt like if i didn t do it, it wasn t going to happen. so what i did was approach people i had met and africatown community leaders and others and said work. i have this idea for a book, but i m this white journalist. i don t even have a connection to alabama. what would you think about me doing this and the response i got pretty much universally was, look, we need all the help we can get. so if you re going to tell their story in responsible way, we would love to have so with that in mind, i moved out and and then i think that that the gesture of moving down this i guess the seriousness and dedication that that showed helped me to continue to build trust when i was there, there were people who were a bit skeptical of me. at first. it was for the most part people in the community did not that they really were more with me than i had any reason to expect them to be. but there were often it was it was people don t live in africatown itself, but who are concerned about the community and have a stake in its future who were concerned about me coming down as a as a white journalist and an outsider and telling the story. but. one of them, i don t know if you a skeptic or not, but i think he might have been is colonel jackson, who was one of the the who s of the stars of the film descendant, the netflix documentary descendant and also the co-writer. he s a folklorist and a professor at the university in mobile and he and i have gotten to be good friends now. and said to me recently, is it that when people like me and and and margaret brown, who s the director of the film, that when we have sort of joined forces with people in africatown to get the story out, that it reminds him of the rights march from selma to montgomery when when black and white people joined to protest this injustice. and i found that really touching. i think i m never going to forget that remark and that i do feel like that was the spirit in which undertook this. so. all along i tried to take measures to make sure that i was doing this in the most ethical, responsible way i could. i i tried to raise up the voices of the people in the community. and i also had. people of color read different portions of the book to give me feedback. and i have to say that the the responses i ve gotten from descendants, from people in the neighborhood and other from others in mobile been very positive so far. well, thank you so much. i think this is an excellent book and should read it. and those especially that have watched the film, the descendants think it s actually companion. and for those of us that are interested in environmental justice and how we get to justice, i think reading about this provides a great inspiration for those of us that are trying to get to where we need to be in terms of addressing the fact that there are so many communities that are under-resourced and overburdened and africatown help us to understand why that came to and also is part of the solution. thank you so much for writing this book. thank you nick. oh, thank you so much for joining me on this interview. it was an honor i admire your work to
i read it personally. i was intrigued by why you were inspired to write this book. and i guess, you know, that s a good place to start. why were you inspired? write this book. i think it is a good place to start. began in 2018 when zora neale hurston book american was being published. you know, it had been on the shelf for 90 years after she wrote it. it s her. it consists her interviews with cudjoe lewis, who one of the last living survivors of the clotilda voyage, the voyage of the last slave ship brought to the us and we were publishing an excerpt of the book in new york magazine. and my editor, murray abraham me in and said, hey, it would be really nice if we could have another to run alongside this one about what became of the descendants kojo so see if you can track them down and and she said maybe we ll send you a mobile and it turned out to be easier said than done to find them had the family had intentionally a low profile. but when i first got a member of that family on the phone gary lumbers who was living near philadelphia. remember i was in this hotel room in west texas working on another story. and said to me pretty forcefully, you don t need to be writing about the descendants. you should be writing about is the neighborhood. he said. when the neighborhood established by the people who had survived the slave and because still intact, it s this amazing historical treasure but gary said it it looks like a war zone now he said, when i was a kid, it was this beautiful, thriving. and now they ve built a highway through the center of the neighborhood. it s surrounded by factory use. there s all this pollution. a lot of the houses abandoned. what happened to it. he felt like it had been. this wasn t just a natural process of decay, but it was it was like a hostile takeover. and so i said, well, that s i would like write about that. that s it. that s a good that it s a good idea. but first, i do need to write this piece about the descendants so but i wrote about both for the magazine i managed to visit and i met all these i happened to be there on a day when a law firm was interviewing people at one of the churches in preparation for a lawsuit were filing against a factory that had polluted the neighborhood, suing them on the basis that had caused cancer for hundreds, thousands of people. and so i spoke to quite a few residents who rattled off a list of all the people in their families who had who had died from cancer often at young ages and who had survived cancer themselves. these stories were harrowing. and so i went back to new york and for a year or so in the back of head, i kept thinking, i wish that i could just move down there and piece the whole history of this community from 1860 to now and figure out the connection between the slave ship and the pollution like why did this neighborhood of all possible places in southern alabama sort of get designated to be the dumping ground for all these for all this heavy industry? and then it occurred to me one day when was walking from my office to the subway that i probably could do that. and, you know, a publisher would would would give me a contract it so i started tapping out a chapter outline on my phone that night and or excuse me the subway ride and i emailed my my agent when i got home and and she know along email describing what i wanted to and she she called me in the morning and said, this is a great idea. you should pursue it. well that s awesome. so, you know, i read the book i saw the book is just as much a historical narrative, you know, as anything and i, i guess for me, i was drawn into it because some of my history is wrapped there too. but i like for you to talk a little bit about how you did the research on, you know, the of africa where people were brought on or enslaved were brought from there could you in describing talk a little bit about what was it like at that particular time because the united states ended the importation of slaves but the mayors and in the end the two gentlemen that did this they went there and brought people back. how were they able to do that? and then what were the consequences, if any, that they suffered in doing it? yeah, happy to speak all of that. my my initial instinct is that it was that i was going to need to go to west africa to research this. but the covid took hold, not long after i started the book in earnest. and so i thought, well, me, let me figure out what i can do without going there. and i realized pretty quickly that that i didn t need to go because what i wanted to do was, describe what what these. countries and what these cities, west africa, looked like in the 1850s and 1860s. and so the best sources, the best resources for that were like travelogs travelogs and academic history. so i did it all from from reading. so we have quite a few. these are oral cultures in west africa that at the time were not recording their history in books. so so unfortunately the best sources we have and what things looked like in the 1850s are travelogs written by white men. you know, usually european men who would travel around the african continent and and just keep sort of a day by day account of what they saw. and, you know, of we have to take everything they say with a grain of salt. there s like a pretty clear colonial at work in these books. but at the same time, i think that, you know, when they re saying, like, i went to the market and, you know, they were selling x, y and z, you can sort of believe that that s you know, that is what the market looked like. and that what they were selling. fortunately, there is quite a vast body of scholarship from the last 50 years of that has built on and the work of these these, you know, 19th century europeans. but put it in context. you know, these historians have read it critically and so and have and have also work on the ground in west africa to help sort of put these these books in context. so i relied i took a lot of cues from from from scholars of africa. and i also had a couple of them, different chapters. so the situation was that this this country, the kingdom of dahomey, had for a long time depended on the slave trade for as the basis of its economy. in the 1850s, most western countries had stopped or had stopped trafficking in slaves. england in particular was was cracking down on the royal navy, policed the atlantic ocean pretty heavily heavily. but dahomey was, you know, reluctant to sort of go along with the europeans for a transition to a an economy based on palm oil exports. so. so it was a it was a kingdom in crisis. and that was context for this this last slave voyage in the alabama. there was this also sort of an economy in crisis that the cotton trade was booming. but there was this huge demand for enslaved workers. but it had been illegal 50 years to bring slaves over from west africa. so so as is really, i think, an act of political protest by this man in mobile, this business magnate named timothy mayer told some associates, i m going to bring over a ship of people and i m going to get away with it. like he said, you know, the federal government is saying they re going to crack down on these things, but i don t believe them. and i said, i m going to prove that you can do it consequence and and i think that he intended for this to be sort of a folly, you know, shot from from the side of these all of these southern businessmen who were actively to to reopen slave trade. so he arranged to have it done that the captain who he hired was a man named bill foster, who was a ship carpenter grew up in nova scotia and in the spring of 1868, foster went to the port of whydah in the gulf of guinea and brought back a ship with 110 men, women and children and sneaked it through mobile, unloaded the captives on another ship, and then burned his ship down to the waterline, destroy the evidence. there s very clear paper showing that federal officials knew all about this voyage, had a chance to had had a chance to rescue these captives. the federal marshal, the us marshal found, them sort being hidden on a plantation but he he couldn t get a warrant in order to make arrests quickly enough. the judge who was with timothy maier dragged his feet and there were no for any of the criminals involved. well so did all of the and i understand there were 101 people, enslaved people that were part of that voyage, where all of them did all of them settle in the town? it was 110. in fact, the majority did not. quite a few of them were sold to businessmen, to owners outside the city mobile. in a lot of cases, we don t know exactly they ended up but we know that some of them ended up in northern parts of alabama. the kept quite a few themselves. and there it was, a few dozen, 30, 35 who who started this community that, you know, that became as africatown after the civil war. let s talk about africatown. i mean, i ve always been fascinated with joe louis and his story because. i ve heard it myself for for quite a long time before it became. you know, part of what we were discussing now and just what new things you learned about him. i know there s there s a lot of folklore in it that i ve heard through the years and and then in reading your book, i saw that you do you do have that really deep and talked to a lot of people about africatown about who joe lewis and his influence as well looking at the history of sources. so what did you know after doing your research. do can you reveal something new about him that this book something new about him that we don t already know you know i found scraps of like news coverage from say the turn of the 20th century that i hadn t mentioned in any other books. one interview, for instance where where he the other shipmates said that they actually saved enough money after right. the civil war to go back to bill foster ship captain and ask to to to sail them back to west africa. and he said that s that s not nearly enough money. you know, this was a business proposition is a business venture. and and i m not going to do this as charity. and i m sorry, but there s just no way that you re ever going to be able to to make enough money to pay me to do that. so so i found details like that that that had not been reported before, but would say that to me one of the more memorable and, sort of startling discoveries about his life was that it s that s it s a little bit more contextual. he describes in the late chapters of baraka. and this sequence, where everyone in his family dies in pretty rapid succession. and he had six children and and a wife who all died in the space of between 15 and 20 years and in cases the most that the circumstances seem a bit mysterious, he ll say in baku something like and then son who was perfectly healthy in his thirties, just fell ill, went to bed and then was sick for two or three days. and then he passed and and we we don t really know what happened. and there s, there s no diagnosis. and so reading these these like health inspector reports from from mobile, from the turn of the 20th century, i realized what was going on there the city was was establishing plumbing, sewers, paving roads. but it was only doing these within the white neighborhoods. all of these improvements tended to stop at the color line and and the city also decided not to annex these black neighborhoods that were outside of the city limits. this is a period when nobody was trying to expand its population, but it was reluctant to bring more african-americans into the city. so. so these black neighborhoods like africatown effectively left in the 19th century. and these diseases were able to continue festering in neighborhoods like joe s. and i realize that s that s what he s talking in. and he probably didn t have access to information about about or perhaps he did. but but he doesn t describe in brooklyn in terms of of these political developments, in terms in terms of the jim crow laws and mores that were governing the development of this of the city in the county. but i think that we to take them together. what he s talking about really is i think you could say the first instantiation of environmental racism. it s it s not pollution. it s it but it s underdevelopment. and it if actively it s the same thing. it it was a it was a product of the jim crow mores and that that s very significant because what you re i think what the book does is kind of lay out a scenario for how we get from there and the connection between enslavement of people and used in slave to where we are now to to have these communities surrounded by all of this pollution and how we get there. and so as we go back to looking at the book. i one of the things i notice was the relationship timothy mair s family and the of these polluting plants in the town. could you talk a little bit about that, about the connection between about their connection to this came to be and how this community became victims of environmental racism? i would be happy to. yeah i have to say that when i started. this your book catherine had not yet come out and i felt. there was a real dearth of of literature on environmental racism and i felt like what your colleague bryan stevenson had done and michelle alexander had done with with the legal system and what what others had done with things like housing, discrimination, redlining. we didn t really have books that did that for environmental racism. and i think both of us are trying remedy that. so i would say that i always think about the reconstruction era where where one of my favorite americans, stevens he was one of the one of the the radical republican legislators gave this speech in pennsylvania, where he said, if we re really serious about about changing things, what we need to do is seize the plantations of these these southern aristocrats, break them up and give us the land to the black people. and he said, actually, a few things will will give the black people means to be independent and meaningfully free. it will break up the power of the southern planter class. and timothy maier would have been would been exactly the target for that kind of a policy. it would it would have changed everything. it s easy to imagine in a scenario like that, a lot of his land would have gone to these shipmates or it could could have it did that did not happen. obviously. instead, their their land and their wealth continued to be passed down from generation to generation in the 1920s, the northern paper industry was making incursions into the south and this enormous paper conglomerate, international paper, approached the chamber of commerce, and said, we d like to build a plant in mobile. can you hook us up with a property and? the chamber of commerce said, sure, how about this? this land that belongs to the mayor, augustine mayor, the son, timothy. timothy was the slaver and so, of course, the people in africatown had means of resisting they they d been they had no they had no they had no political power. they d been stripped of their voting rights. so so the paper company made a deal with with the mayor family. i think everybody knew that this factory was going to be smelly and it was going to emit a huge amount of pollution and they didn t want it downtown. so it made sense to put it in this black neighborhood and so that the mayor family ended up leasing selling land to two paper factories and over time it it we used and sold the land two more factories besides different different kinds of industries. so now. 160 years after the slave voyage, family still owns a massive amount of property. southern alabama and and and that includes a lot of the land surrounding africatown that these factories are sited on and they made immense of money from from leasing these factories that have polluted the neighborhood the family has avoided public attention for the most part. since the 1970s. but there are some signs that that they might be that they might be opening up. but that s good to hear. but i want to go back to a point that we raised earlier when we talked about oral history, how much did oral history play? because i saw a lot of the interviews you did. and so interesting for me to look at this and read it because a lot of those people know they ve been around and been fighting and for a very long for not just environmental justice, but for civil rights. so much. did oral history play in your research and in crafting this story, it played a significant role. i, i did tend to rely on documentary resources as much as i could. and i have to say that i found that many of the descendants of the shipmates are hungry to know what we have documented evidence for they have the descendants pore over the books that have been written about the neighborhood and they and they like to collect things. marriage certificates and deeds and old newspaper clips. but but they do have stories that they ve that they ve passed on along among their families that i also tried integrate in in the book. and in sometimes the lines sort of blurs because i was able to find interviews that were done in, say, the 1970s or eighties with or what your generations of descendants where they told that they knew from their parents that stories that i never heard from from people who are in the community now or who are descendants now. so it was always a back and forth between documented documentary sources and oral history. well, one of the things that struck me was was reading about the role of carter g. woodson in his role in the story. could you elaborate on that a little bit? yeah, this gets into into zora neale territory, which is a place where i m happy to be. i love i love carter g. woodson that as call him the father of african-american history. he was the editor in the 1920s of the journal of history. and zora neale hurston was an undergrad at barnard college here in new york. and her mentor was was franz boas a towering in american anthropology as she was getting ready to graduate, he boas said, i m going to try to find you a fellowship. so you go do some field research and he was able to come up with some money from columbia. and then carter g. woodson s organization, too, was able to come up with some money to to fund her trip. so she bought a car and drove around the gulf coast, her hometown in florida, which is eatonville over to alabama she interviewed joe wilson in 1927 and she wrote an article him that was published in carter g. woodson s journal later that year. unfortunately we found out decades later that that interview was largely plagiarized she she drew pretty heavily on that and another book that had come out about. 12 or 15 years earlier. it wasn t the plagiarism discovered in her lifetime, but but she went back, did more original research for the book that became american american. so with me, it s when i looked at the book, said she wrote the book in four parts. why four parts? i saw, you know, looking at it as a former history teacher like you divided it up so that people could get the relationship to the time. so could you talk a little about those four parts and why you chose to do it that way? certainly, the the divisions just seem natural. i, i have to say that they came in sort of late. i proposed to my editor when we were we had pretty much finished the text. we had done most of the copy editing. i said, you know, i really think there should be besides a chapter breaks, there should be bigger section breaks here. i had five chapters that cover the situation in west the clotilda voyage everything up to the civil war so that that pretty clearly like a like distinct section a second section covered reconnoiter action through through the 1930s through the end of kargil with us his wife because cudjoe was the last one the last in mobile to pass away then there s a leap 15 years forward 50 and 20 years forward in the 1950s when one of my principal characters and a good friend and and and somebody i admire joe womack was up in the community that he was born in. he was born just 15 years after country. lewis died. so so joe became my main vehicle for if we re talking about the modern history of africatown and so there are a few chapters that the community he was young and then go through the nineties and then there s a fourth section that covers developments from basically the past decade when, when joe has become this sort of a warrior for environmental justice. and you also talk about the environmental organization that is there in ramsey as you know, i know him know his work. and i just thought it was so significant that he also factors in to the modern day history the town. could you elaborate a little bit on what his organization, what ramsey is doing in there? of course, yeah. i, i admire ramsey so much. he he first comes up in the book in 2013. he was there at this meeting where there was a plan to to build a another tank farm, a whole bunch of petroleum near africatown. these tanks are enormous there. each one is like as big as a house. it s to to build these near africatown at the same time to build an oil pipeline that was going to go through the primary source of drinking water for most southern alabama and ramsey had been fighting the keystone xl pipeline. he had a background in in direct action and. so he came he came to these mobile aliens on what they could do. and i find it pretty stirring when he enters the picture there are a lot of people talking about there are a lot of white people talking about about their drinking water and, you know, understandable. they don t want they want, in my mind, going through their their water supply. but but ramsey steps up and says, don t, don t forget about these communities like africatown and prichard. these communities that are these communities of color that have been dealing with pollution forever. it was the last they ve been around. and he and he said, this is environmental racism. we need to recognize it that way. and it was a vocabulary that that even joe womack didn t have at the time joe womack, who grew up in africatown. he told me that that later on he once he started engaging in these protests, he kept hearing the term environmental and he had just gotten a computer and he went on the internet and he was thinking, what the hell was, environmental justice. and he he punched it into and he found this epa that explained environmental justice and environmental racism. and he said, oh, my god. like they wrote this for us, but but ramsey helped helped. he helped the people wanted to do something. he helped them sort of coalesce their efforts in and into a targeted program. and they started an organization called meet me jack mobile, environmental justice action coalition. and ramsey has been been a leader in that organization from the beginning. he ended up moving mobile from texas and he s dedicated the last ten years or so of his life to this project full time. ramsey, i should mention, is his american. he comes from a from a tribe that has roots on the gulf coast and i he s he s extremely savvy. he he interfaces a lot with with the federal government. i know he s got the ear of. the the regional director of epa and so i admire him for his his moral devotion and for his his as an as an activist. he knows how to get things done. he is i just thought is so interesting when i was reading this there are so many intersection and so many things that were very similar to what i was going through at the time when i saw that francis had been involved with fighting the dakota access at sea world, he and i could have both in it been there at the same time when we went to the fight pipeline and i just so also moved by the fact that a lot of what you write about is is true of a lot environmental justice areas. the difference at least the areas that are dealing with environmental especially if you look throughout the gulf coast and look at alley a lot of what you describe i ve heard in other places but, what s significant about this book is that the people that are impacted can actually trace their history back to africa at a certain time and they can there s connection between when they were brought from africa as enslaved people and the end of slavery and the events state and then that line that drawn from there to present day, which is different than what we would find any other area of the of a u.s. so how do you think what do you think the solutions are? how do how do we get to justice in communities like africa town and what you ve seen there, what do you think look like for the descendants yeah this is something i ve thought about a lot. i think we ve all everybody who has a stake in this story has thought about a lot. i would say that mobile is, as i say, and in my second to last chapter struggles with this question of whether it wants to be more like charleston charleston, beautiful waterfront city that that bases its economy on tourism and markets. it s it s excellent seafood or if it wants be more like houston and steak everything and the petrochemical industry and i have to give ramsey credit for that he s the one who pointed out this distinction to me. and the current leadership, the city just just refuses to. treat that as a serious question and insists that they can have it both ways. and the current mayor s slogan is that he wants mobile be the most business and family friendly in mobile excuse me, in america, as if there were no tension between those those goals. but in mobile s case, there clearly are. i mean, there s almost no access to the waterfront for for people who live in mobile because because it s all occupied by heavy industry. and in plays into the africatown question because i think mobile phones been a little bit reluctant to accept this, but the truth is that this is a city that s very proud of of aspects of its history, its maritime history, its time under french and spanish, understandably but its proud of its mardi gras traditions. but the truth is that there s nothing else in mobile history that that compares in terms of national and international significance to the story of africatown, the creation of this this neighborhood by west africans who would personally survive the middle passage. and so if they were going to base their economy more on tourism would make sense for for africatown to be sort the centerpiece and the local government does make some of support but but there s a lot of skepticism in the neighborhood about whether they re really serious. i think that if you were serious what you would do is is start to rid of the factories surrounding neighborhood you would rezone property so that so the factories there now the tank farms they re we re not in compliance. and what that would mean was that when their say when their tanks aged out and new ones to be built that the policies would say sorry you can t you build a new tank farm here. you can t you install new tanks here like that s you re done and that the local authorities like to say that this is not constitutional. it s not just simply be done legally. and that s not that that attorney who knows more about zoning than anybody else in southern alabama, wanda cochran. walked me through this and explain to me how it could be done. and the truth is that it can. of course, the city s economy is based, so it s, so dependent on the industry that s already there. it it would be really hard for them to do this. i think this speaks to why environmental racism is so to uproot. but that s i think that s what justice. looks like it like getting rid of the factories and and and and making it possible for this place really thrive again as a residential area would mean building more housing it would mean it would mean encouraging growth of black of of independent businesses used to be many black owned businesses that were wiped out by by construction and and it would mean it mean more investment in the neighborhood. i think that s true for similar neighborhoods apart from africatown too. it s certainly true for cancer alley, louisiana and explain both. you know, i ve actually spent some with some of the senators recently and i saw in your book you talked about with the highway and it could you kind of explain how it how the the highway system factors into the story of africatown because i know just from my own life experiences how these highways have been built and disrupted black communities. how did highways factor into the building of highways packed into system and where to africatown to the yeah it s it s a prevalent phenomenon as we both know in africatown case after these factories to be built it more and more of them accrued around the neighborhood. and there was a bridge across across the river close to the neighborhood that they use to transport materials for the industries in and out, you know, paper, use them to to bring logs back and forth and that sort of thing. so it was a but there were huge traffic delays. it was becoming unworkable for companies. so they wanted a new bigger tower, a bridge built in order facilitate this the state highway department had to build bigger highway leading up to it and it ended up wiping. africatown whole business corridor people. describe how the neighborhood used to have grocery stores movie, theaters, hotels it it had you know bars, nightclubs it had everything that that that you would need you know, you could buy you entertainment and it had had the necessities and as i say, most of these shops were owned by by local entrepreneurs, by black businessmen and women. of course, the community protested hard when when the state wanted to build this highway through that that corridor, there was a there was also a viable that would have required the factories to give up some of their land. there was a time when the state actually favored that idea and was moving in direction. but the companies hired the former i it was the speaker of the alabama house who is now working in private practice as an attorney to lobby against it and have the factory go through africatown instead. and that campaign was so in the 1980s, they they were moving forward with this plan at the same, there was an effort to get in africatown in the national historical program, or at least the national register of historic places and had it become a landmark, it would have there would have been protections against against these disruptive construction projects. you know, the law would have said, you can t destroy any more of this neighborhood. the reagan administration said, well, don t really think there s anything left there. it s all just now that was not in fact, there were about a dozen houses that had actually been built by the shipmates themselves, houses built by the people who survived the last slave voyage to the us if that doesn t qualify you for landmark status, then i can t imagine what would. but they never sent a team down to do a survey and so up to the last minute before the construction began descendants were pleading with the state highway department not to destroy these houses. and i found these letters where that that where an engineer the state said work if you want to pay relocate the houses, that s fine. but we re not waiting. we have we have a deadline to start the construction you know, every day that we delay cost more taxpayer money so, you know, either move them or or just get out of the way and us bulldoze them and ultimately most of the homes were not relocated and were destroyed along with the along with the business corridor. and instead of instead of a instead of a like a walkable, pedestrian, friendly area where you could go get your hair done, could go see a movie, you could go buy your groceries they built this five lane highway trucks passing through 65 miles an hour, broke the back of the neighborhood and the trucks are carrying hazardous cargo. so again, this happened in many but i think it s hard to find an example that s more egregious than the one that happened in africatown. so when you book basically what you describe is the fair you reconstruction the policies of the jim crow era you talk about how voting rights were taken away from people of color. the under-development that that in mobile around black communities where city services including plumbing sewer which i know so much about stop at the edges of the white communities and then in the seventies epa was and the dixiecrats started talking states rights. you know that. yeah. as you said in your book that that s the same rhetoric that was used to describe slavery but now you know we ve look at all of this and the continued in there of all of these things that have happening. i mean, i want to ask else, too, that, you know, same type of rhetoric that is being used now. the stereotype to even prevent us from talking about this history, even prevent maybe in the future a book about another book about the town or your book, even a part of this narrative that we need to discuss so we can get to where we need to. how do you feel about that? and it s current time. if you look at all of this and look at it seems like we ve come full circle to go back to where we started. yeah thinking about things like like these policies in florida banning this kind of history from from school curricula. i mean what, do you say about it it s it s it s really. i you you know, i recently wrote a piece for the washington post about this group, the afro-american bicentennial, that that was responsible for getting getting dozens of black history sites added to the landmarks program in the seventies and this was leading up to the bicentennial celebration in in 76. and they people knew that if they didn t if didn t get involved, the the celebrations were going to be totally eurocentric. it was just going to on white people s history. and and when i spoke with one of the people who spearheaded this event, forest, he he s he s in his eighties now when he said it s so disheartening to see these arguments critical race theory and these policies like the one in florida. it s like he said i feel like exactly same way i felt in 1970. we re like we re sometimes it feels as if we haven t made any progress in some ways we have. but he said it s clear that we re still fighting the same battles. i think he s right. it and i just want to you to also make sure we talk about the quality of and its significance here because i think it was during the time you doing your research that they actually found the children and why that is so significant significant. yeah it was i was in the early stages of working on a book proposal when i on the phone with joe womack and he said, did you hear the news and i didn t know what he was talking about. and he said they they found the ship in, the mobile delta. the wreckage is still still mostly intact. so a lot of people, both in africatown, surrounding africatown and at the senate say is that they re less concerned about the ship itself. they re what they care about is the people, whether that means for them, the people who in africatown now or the story of their ancestors. but they see the of this wreckage of the ship as a means to an end of of both telling the story and of restoring the community it s hard to imagine a better i guess a better asset building. this is a heritage. industry than than having the remains of the last the last slave ship still unclear whether it s going to be dredged, as i understand, scientists are currently assessing that would even be a possibility. we know that if it were, it would be incredibly expensive. as jim delgado, the chief archeologist, always says, where could that money be better? you know, maybe it could be better spent in africatown. but to their credit that the archeologists and other officials in charge of this have always said we re not going to make this decision ourselves, want this decision to be to be made by by the community descendants and the people in the neighborhood. so we ll see what comes of that. well, that s great. know that in my conversations them oftentimes when people talk about economic development in the town i saw that you talked about this in the book as. well they make reference to the the national example, the piece of injustice in montgomery and how this could that can be a model for africatown in terms of history and being able to to bring the type of economic development, the area that it doesn t currently have. do you see a relationship there now that you ve written the book between between what is happening in montgomery around this history and what could potentially happen in africatown? i do believe within a year of its opening, the the museum and memorial, montgomery had brought something like billion dollars in economic activity to the city and in a way, it does feel crass. talk about it in terms of dollars and cents, because obviously that project not it s not primarily a moneymaking venture. it s it feels like a sacred experience to go through it at the same time, you know our friends in africatown are very savvy. i said, and they know that that they have to appeal to more than people s moral sensibilities. they also have have a plan for how this could actually work. and they they, you know, they they they re sort of saying, look, there s another way. if you got rid of the factories, it s not it s not as if you would lose all that money. if there s there s an alternative there s another way of bringing tax revenue and spurring economic. i think they also take inspiration from the museum memorial in montgomery and the level of the kind of experience that it that it provides to people who visit which as i said, is a very stirring experience and it s encouraging to see that they re such a big audience for this this sort of thing. you know, i at the the smithsonian african-american museum pretty recently just just a few weeks ago on a saturday and i had to reserve my ticket weeks in advance. then when i got there, i had to you know, even having a ticket i had to wait for 20 minutes or something just to see the in a long line, just to see that, the first the first exhibit in the museum. and i mean, i was encouraged to see that. i was happy to be waiting. i was happy to see that there were so many people there because it reminded me and black and white, this crowd seemed pretty evenly mixed and it reminded me that i think that if they build something like in africatown, people will come and. the experience in montgomery really shows us that, well, this is my final question and this is one that i thought about asking earlier, but i think this is a great time to ask you and i like to know, how do you feel? tell me, how you feel as a white journalist, you know, having to navigate these complications to be able to bring of this out in the open? yeah, that s that s something i ve thought about from the very moment that i conceived the idea for the book, it s something i still think about lot. you know it s not as if there were journalists color queuing up to do this. it s not as if i was pushing anybody aside and i would not would not have done that. but i felt like if i didn t do it, it wasn t going to happen. so what i did was approach people i had met and africatown community leaders and others and said work. i have this idea for a book, but i m this white journalist. i don t even have a connection to alabama. what would you think about me doing this and the response i got pretty much universally was, look, we need all the help we can get. so if you re going to tell their story in responsible way, we would love to have so with that in mind, i moved out and and then i think that that the gesture of moving down this i guess the seriousness and dedication that that showed helped me to continue to build trust when i was there, there were people who were a bit skeptical of me. at first. it was for the most part people in the community did not that they really were more with me than i had any reason to expect them to be. but there were often it was it was people don t live in africatown itself, but who are concerned about the community and have a stake in its future who were concerned about me coming down as a as a white journalist and an outsider and telling the story. but. one of them, i don t know if you a skeptic or not, but i think he might have been is colonel jackson, who was one of the the who s of the stars of the film descendant, the netflix documentary descendant and also the co-writer. he s a folklorist and a professor at the university in mobile and he and i have gotten to be good friends now. and said to me recently, is it that when people like me and and and margaret brown, who s the director of the film, that when we have sort of joined forces with people in africatown to get the story out, that it reminds him of the rights march from selma to montgomery when when black and white people joined to protest this injustice. and i found that really touching. i think i m never going to forget that remark and that i do feel like that was the spirit in which undertook this. so. all along i tried to take measures to make sure that i was doing this in the most ethical, responsible way i could. i i tried to raise up the voices of the people in the community. and i also had. people of color read different portions of the book to give me feedback. and i have to say that the the responses i ve gotten from descendants, from people in the neighborhood and other from others in mobile been very positive so far. well, thank you so much. i think this is an excellent book and should read it. and those especially that have watched the film, the descendants think it s actually companion. and for those of us that are interested in environmental justice and how we get to justice, i think reading about this provides a great inspiration for those of us that are trying to get to where we need to be in terms of addressing the fact that there are so many communities that are under-resourced and overburdened and africatown help us to understand why that came to and also is part of the solution. thank you so much for writing this book. thank you nick. oh, thank you so much for joining me on this interview. it was an honor i admire your work togood evening, everyone. i m i m the senior pastor you are in a relatively new space but
Mr. Timothy Taylor is a lifelong West Virginian and an entrepreneur who is training the workforce that we re going to need to get broadband throughout our
From the u.s. customs and border protection. this is the record high. new information from an interview with the lead january six committee investigator. timothy told my colleague nicole about similarities between the charlotte whites premised rally and the january 6th attack. witness testimony about trump s influence on the decision to participate. there were mark meadows text messages. they were connected to media personalities. that was the role of some members of congress. he decided that he would not sit for an interview. i look, it is a change course. we were on the process with mr. meadows. he was afraid to come in. he provided documents. 1000 patients of documents. text messages that were important.
Lead us, and i really do, or i would not be up here leading this speech. i came in here with kevin 16 years ago and we have not always agreed, and i like his fight and tenacity and kevin told me in a book, the toughest questions are when you get knocked down, and can you come back? and yes, we need to rally around, and come together and deal with these three thing, because this is what the people sent us here to do. and my favorite scripture verse is paul saying to timothy, fight the good fight and stay the course and keep the faith, and i like the verse of action, and not wimpy words, but words that fit america, and this is what the american people want, they elected to us do, and we should all remember, remember that 12,000 people have ever had the
steve: on this wednesday we are four days away from christmas, and a brand-new poll reveals that 84% of christians feel that americans have forgotten the true meaning of christmas. brian: joining us right n now, i m archbishop of new york, timothy cardinal dillon. is it cardinal timothy dolan or timothy cardinal dolan? timothy is fine. just don t call me late for supper. [laughter] you look like you have lost weight. i m down to xxl. brian: what about that question? do you sense that, that christians are to satisfied that you ve lost the meaning of the season? l, you have paid you didn t even offer me an eggnog! i get hung up on this, but i m
Gareth southgate called on his side to do better in this next match talking about the importance of qualifying for the next round as quickly as possible. and they know they can do that with a win against the u.s. tonight. as you mentioned, this is a really young, dynamic, exciting u.s. side. many of whom play their club football in england, the likes of christiane pulisic, tyler adams, and their goal scorer against wales timothy said they re relishing that title as underdogs. their coach has said you know, now they have got that huge emotional moment out of the way of all of this squad by one player making their world cup debut they can focus on the job in hand. they joined their families on tuesday night.
Three children. i have to have them all. i didn t think we could get i figured that it would be a single pregnancy. but during an ultrasound, they discovered they were having twins. i don t think there is any risk to freezing embryos that is related to the number of years that the embryo is frozen. we have been freezing embryos for nearly 40 years and there has not been an increase risk to the babies or to the pregnant women. what makes the embryo a good quality often times is the age of the woman at the time that she donated eggs. and so the younger the woman, the more likely that embryos is going to be normal. for the ridgways, it is all part of something larger. something they view as a personal mission. it is hard to wrap your mind around that i was five years old when god gave life to lydia and timothy. they re our oldest children even
And we have been cryo preserving embryos for nearly 40 years and there s not an increased risk to the babies or to the pregnant women. what makes the embryo a good quality oftentimes is the age of the woman at the time she donated eggs. the younger the woman, the more likely the embryo is going to be normal. reporter: for the ridgeways it s something larger, something they view as a personal mission. i was five years old when god gave life to lydia and timothy. in a real sense they re our oldest children, even though they re our smallest children. reporter: dr. sanjay gupta, cnn, reporting. they are adorable, don t you think? very cute. healthy babies. that s all that matters. that s all that matters. a lot of developments this morning, especially coming out of colorado. our coverage of a shooting that